Google Speed Update
Using page speed in mobile search ranking
Google announced “starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.” Are you prepared? Read up on site speed and optimizing for mobile on our site!
The “Speed Update,” as Google calls it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.
In April 2010, Google did announce a page speed ranking factor but that only worked on desktop and as we said, Google’s mobile search rankings use desktop speed – which made no sense. We thought, even Google though, that when the mobile first index goes live that they would not have a page speed factor but we did know they were working on that issue. Well, they were kind of right, because it did start to go live and this mobile speed thing won’t be live until July.
Google says you can measure your page speed multiple ways and they are not sharing a specific single metric to know if your site was hit by this algorithm update or not. In fact, Google told me in my big FAQ on the speed update at Search Engine Land that there won’t even be a notification in the Google Search Console if you do get hit by this update, that is because this is an algorithmic thing, not a manual action.
Sources: Search Engine Roundtable